World AIDS Day is held on 1 December every year and provides an opportunity for people across the globe to show solidarity with the millions of people living with HIV. This year’s campaign theme is ‘HIV Stigma: Not Retro, Just Wrong’ #HIVNotRetro and you can find out more about how to get involved at https://www.worldaidsday.org/.
To mark World AIDS Day 2016 we are sharing an extract from Fighting the stigma of HIV and AIDS published on the OUP blog and co-authored by Landon Myer, a member of the IJE Editorial Board. The articles he references have been made freely available until 1 March 2017.
Landon Myer is a professor within the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His work centres around women’s, maternal and child health in the context of HIV/AIDS, and includes clinical, population-based and health systems research, with a particular interest in the health of HIV-infected women during pregnancy and postpartum, as well as the health and development of their children.
We asked him how he thought views on HIV and AIDS have changed over the past ten years:
One of the massive shifts over the last ten years has been in viewing HIV/AIDS as a unique, unprecedented epidemic – which it once was in many respects – to a condition that can be successfully managed for decades with effective antiretroviral therapy. This realisation has been driven by state-of-the-art epidemiologic research. This includes sophisticated observational analyses that allow researchers to approximate complex treatment strategies (Cain, et al.), comparisons of treatment responses showing comparable treatment outcomes across the globe (Geng, et al.) and research platforms for population-based HIV research from across sub-Saharan Africa (Reniers, et al). These examples from the last 12 months are just a few examples of the epidemiological research that has helped to propel our understandings of HIV/AIDS forward at a remarkable rate.
– Landon Myer, International Journal of Epidemiology
The full-length blog post ‘Fighting the stigma of HIV and AIDS‘ by Quique Bassat, Martin Hirsch, Landon Myer, Peter Piot and David Wilson is available from the OUP Blog.
Read more:
Cain LE, Saag MS, Petersen M, et al. Using observational data to emulate a randomized trial of dynamic treatment-switching strategies: an application to antiretroviral therapy Int. J. Epidemiol. (2015) doi: 10.1093/ije/dyv295.
Geng EH, Neilands TB, Thiebaut R, et al. CD4+ T cell recovery during suppression of HIV replication: an international comparison of the immunological efficacy of antiretroviral therapy in North America, Asia and Africa Int. J. Epidemiol. (2015) 44 (1): 251-263.
Reniers G, Wamukoya M, Urassa M, et al. Data Resource Profile: Network for Analysing Longitudinal Population-based HIV/AIDS data on Africa (ALPHA Network) Int. J. Epidemiol. (2016) 45 (1):83-93.
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